


The Dreamer

by fyrefairee



Series: The Dreamer [2]
Category: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist - Rachel Cohn & David Levithan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-17 04:51:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10586802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fyrefairee/pseuds/fyrefairee
Summary: She dreams, and wakes up with tattoos.Going across multiple fandoms, meeting many familiar faces.





	1. Introduction

There are days I hate the fact that my parents decided to get all Irish and call me Aisling. 

 

I know, I know, it’s just a name, I can change it, there are so many nick names out there. But. Like. Just… Really guys? None of my names are pronounceable. It’d be okay if my surname was Smith or Jones or something. But no. That would be too easy.

 

Instead, let me introduce myself.

 

My name is Aisling M örk  Wiśniewski. 

 

Yeah.

 

My parents screwed me.

 

My parents are all about meanings of names. Aisling is a dreamer,  M örk is a forest, and  Wiśniewski has something to do with cherries. Plus, it’s a name that somehow hasn’t been Anglicized after 5 generations away from Poland. How that happened is utterly beyond me. Like, how did no one just get so tired of correcting everyone that they changed it?

 

Who knows.

 

But, yeah. That’s me. The dreamer in the forest with cherries.

 

Sounds kinda poetic, right?

 

Well, what it’s meant for me is that every person who ever sees my name written down just kinda pauses. My whole life, teachers and doctors and the DMV just kinda read my name, and hope I’ll realise that I’m the one that they want. I like the people who at least try to say it and butcher it to the ones who don’t even try. I’m not a blank space Mrs Vanes. You can’t just pause every time you get to me on the roll.

 

Yeah, I’m still pretty angry about that. And that was seven years ago.

 

Anyway, because my name is difficult, I go by Ash. It’s just easier. People can say it. People can read it. People stop freaking out.

 

Oh. And my parents getting all Irish? Mum has Irish heritage, like 150 years ago. I’m pretty much a mutt. If an ethnic group lived in Canada in the last 200 years, chances are I have some blood from them.

 

Other than my name, there isn’t much about me that is remarkable. I’m a 22 year old nominally white girl from Ottawa. I’ve been dating my boyfriend for like 2 years now. His name is Haris. And, cos we’re talking name meanings, his is the protector. Or guardian. Which seems fitting for me, dreaming and wandering about forests. I havea year left of my degree - comparative literature and creative writing. Not exactly something that will earn me big bucks, but it has taught me to write and think and I’ve enjoyed it. 

 

Haris is a computer god. It if has wires and needs code, he can make it work. We moved in together about 6 months ago, and we had to get a 2 bed place so there would be somewhere for him to tinker. It sounds really flippant when I say that, but I don’t really understand what he does. He builds and mods and writes code and… yeah, that’s all I understand. I know that he’s good at it, but when he tries to explain it, he might as well be speaking martian. It goes totally over my head. 

 

We don’t have any kids, and we aren’t engaged or anything, but we did buy a love fern recently. So, that’s totally like we’re committed, right?

 

As I said, normal. Ticking all the boxes for ‘standard progression from child to teen to adult’. Yep. That’s me. Normal.

 

Oh. And one other thing.

 

I dream about other people’s lives and wake up with tattoos.

 

Yeah, I sound like a head case.

 

But hear me out. This is my diary after all. Well - it’s the internet, but the internet is like the modern diary isn’t it? I’m not tagging this, so I’ll be stunned if anyone ever finds it. Not that anyone would believe me, even if they did. It sounds too much like one of the things I have to write for my fantasy course to be true. I mean, come on. Tattoos are kinda serious body modification. They take time and money and an artist and planning. You don’t just go to sleep and wake up with them.

 

Except I do.

 

It’s happened ten times now.

 

I freaked out the first time it happened. 

 

I mean, well.

 

Like.

 

I don’t remember my dreams. I know I dream, cos logic dictates I do. Plus, Haris has watched me sleep a bunch of times (totally creepy, yes) while he was pulling all nighters, and he says that my eyes totally do the REM thing. Occasionally I even talk in my sleep. Nonsense babbling, but enough to be noticeable. But when I wakeup, they are gone. Wiped from my memory. I’ve tried all sorts of ‘tricks’ to help me remember, but I’ve never found anything that did. 

 

So, it’s normal to me that dreams are not something that gets remembered. I understand intellectually that I dream, and I also understand that other people remember their dreams, but it’s just so foreign to me that I can’t relate.

 

So, the first I woke up and remembered my dream was terrifying.

 

I don’t mean terrifying like it was a nightmare. I mean terrifying like you get home and all the furniture is on the ceiling and you live alone and WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON.

 

That first time, I was so freaked out by remembering the dream, it took me almost a week to find the tattoo.

 

The dream was short. They’re kinda like watching movies. Except I’m the narrator? I dunno. I’ve tried to explain this to Haris so many times, and each time I fail miserably.

 

Anyway, I was in a car, and there were two people in it - a guy and a girl. She’s driving, and he’s grabbing something from the glove compartment. I didn’t hear the start of the conversation, just the middle. The dream was so short that I didn’t even hear the end of the conversation.

 

The girl was talking about music, claiming that she and the guy really were musical soul mates. 

 

“I still want that t-shirt, you know,” she said.

 

“Which one?” he’d replied.

 

“Nick and Norah Went to the Marriott Marquis and All I Got Was This Lousy Shirt.”

 

“Oh, that one. I can have Dev make it up for you if you want?”

 

“Nah, it’s not the same. It has to come from one of those crappy tourist stalls down in Chinatown, y’know? Dev’s stuff is to good.”

 

He nods his head side to side in reply, flicking through a wallet filled with CDs.

 

“What do you feel like today?” he asks.

 

“Fluffy. It has to be Fluffy. Fluffy’s where it all started… and they are who we are commemorating today, after all.”

 

The guy who I can only assume is Nick flips to the very front of the wallet and pulls out a CD. “Sure you don’t want the Beatles?” he asks, and I can hear the teasing note in his voice. Her look tells me that it’s not the first time he’s asked, and that it must be an ongoing discussion between them. “Fine,” he continues, “Fluffy it is.”

 

He starts to put the CD into the car’s player as the world dissolved. Burned? I dunno, dissolved sounds less scary. I never did get to hear what Fluffy sounded like.

 

I woke with a start after that first dissolve. 

 

I could feel my heart racing as my mind tried to comprehend the fact it could remember the dream. 

 

It was the dead of winter, and I was trying to spend as little time as possible without clothes on. I may have been born here, but I’ve never liked Canadian winters. Give me year round sunshine and temperatures that stay above freezing. But, thanks to the cold, I spending very little time naked as a I got in or out of the shower. So it took me nearly a week to discover the tattoo. Just inside my right hip bone, I had a tiny bunny - what I could only assume was Fluffy.

 

It might sound strange, but it was more concerning to me that I had remembered a dream than the fact I had suddenly gained a tattoo I hadn’t gone to get. Plus, I was seventeen at the time, and I couldn’t have legally gotten a tattoo, so I thought it was probably a good idea not to show anyone - easy given the placement. 

 

I know, I should have been more worried about the tattoo than the dream. 

 

Perhaps I’m not as normal as I like to think.


	2. Chapter Two: Nick and Norah

About a month after that first tattoo appeared, I went into the city with some of my friends. My friend Sarah had discovered some new and awesome band, and we just _haaaaaaaad_ to go and see them with her. Her emphasis, not mine. In a rare display of parental relaxation, my parents had actually allowed me to go with my friends, the six of us, unaccompanied, to see the band play. It was part of this underage, no alcohol no drugs festival. Seven bands were playing in the Village, and the last finished at like 8pm, when it was still light out and ‘safe.’ Food trucks and the whole works.

 

Sarah loves live music, more than anyone else I know. Once she’s 21, I think all her money will be spent at clubs finding the next ‘it’ band, but for now she’s stuck at these all ages gigs. She wanted to see one of the bands, it was playing second last. Last Ruby. But she insisted that we get there early and listen to all the bands. It was a mix of rock and punk. I’ve always preferred rock, but it was a day with my friends, in the city, without my parents. Don’t get me wrong, I love my parents, but they’re like… old… and uncool… and I was a bratty teenager. (Yes, yes, was only 5 years ago, I’m not that old, yada yada yada. But it’s true. I was a bratty teenager). I know that. So, we trouped off with Sarah, and arrived like half and hour before the first band. Listened to them, and the next and the next. 

 

The fourth band though.

 

Yeah.

 

Kinda blew my mind.

 

They were called ‘crappy tourist tshirt’. Punk band. Queercore, although I’m not convinced that all of them were gay. 

 

Their music wasn’t exactly what I’m into.

 

Understatement.

 

I really don’t like punk. I don’t like the way people dance to it. I don’t like the screamy way the singers ‘sing.’ If you can call it that. I dunno. It’s just not for me.

 

These guys weren’t any different. But, they seemed to be switching up rock and punk bands, so I knew that I would have some nice, normal, non screamy rock next, so I wasn’t too unhappy. 

 

Then they wrapped up, and did the usual end of show merch pitch. Standard. CDs, posters, tshirts. The norm.

 

Except the last thing they pitched was their super limited edition, nearly sold out “Nick and Norah Went to the Marriott Marquis and All I Got Was This Lousy Shirt” tshirts.

 

Dafuc?

 

Like.

 

Just. 

 

What?

 

Yep. I bought one of those suckers. It’s in a drawer at home. 

 

I looked them up after the festival. 

 

According to their website, crappy tourist tshirt (yep, they are all lowercase) is a queercore punk band from New Jersey. They play regularly in NYC. The band is made up of Thom Brandon, Dev Patel, Nick O’Leary. Their art is done by Lethario Andersson. And their music is produced by Norah Silverberg. 

 

Yep.

 

Nick O’Leary and Norah Silverberg.

 

Nick and Norah.

 

From my dream.

 

Understandably, I was a touch freaked out to have encountered people from my dream. That they were real. That might be the understatement of the century.

 

Dreams aren’t real. If you can remember them. If you can't remember them. It doesn’t matter. They are just your brain processing the day. Working through it all. The people you see in your dreams are always people you’ve seen. Your brain cannot create people. They might seem like strangers to you, but they’re not. They might be someone you passed on the street, or a background actor on some TV show you watched or whatever, but they are always part of your world. Real. 

 

I’ve read a lot about dreams.

 

I’d never seen Nick and Norah before I dreamed about them. I’m sure of it. Heck, I barely saw Nick when he was on stage. I assume that Norah was in the crowd, but I wasn’t looking for her so I don’t remember seeing her.

 

So, how on earth did my brain dream these people. 

 

Yeah.

 

You can see why I freaked out.

 

I looked up ‘fluffy band’ as well.

 

Turns out that there is a band called ‘Where’s Fluffy?’ 

 

They’re a punk band from NYC.

 

Their logo is a rabbit.

 

Their logo is the same logo that I have on my hip.

 

Given the dreams that I’ve had since the Nick and Norah dream, I’d bet money that Norah (or maybe Nick, but the placement seems more like something a girl would get) has the same tattoo just inside her right hip bone.

 

Yep.

 

I dreamed about these real people listening to a real band.

 

Seriously.

 

What.

 

The.

 

Fuck?


End file.
